Andrew Lok, a.k.a. contestant #28, won the Thursday round of the TTAC Future Writers Week by a wide margin. His epos on stolen GPS machines, and his pilgrimage to the Valhalla of Speed, the Nürburgring der Niebelongen, received 45 percent of all votes on Thursday. In the following week, when the full results of TTAC’s Future Writers Week were published, Lok was gone.
TTAC’s Managing Editor Derek Kreindler shocked me with the news that he will undergo a life-threatening operation on Monday: His tonsils will be removed. Should his doctor not know what he is doing, now he does.
Derek had even more shocking news for me: He will be out all week, nursing his removed tonsils with the vanilla ice cream they had promised me when my tonsils came out at age five. They never gave me the ice cream, but leaving me alone at the helm of TTAC, Derek gives me a big problem. You, Future Writers, can help:
Rich, the mastermind behind the Rocket Surgery Racing mid-VW-engined Renault 4CV, just got hired to install a daily-driver-suitable modern drivetrain in a ’53 Ford coupe. The owner wanted to keep it all Ford, EFI makes for much better real-world drivability, and so a late 1980s or newer Ford 5.0 or 5.8 (aka 302 or 351W) V8 engine looked to be the best choice. Running donor cars and trucks that fit those requirements tend to go for four figures, so it was time to hit a Denver-area police-impound auction. Here’s what happened yesterday. Read More >
NOTE: I received the following email from Saab Automobile Parts North America. As I was not aware of the recent details behind Saab’s parts/service operation (my bad) I felt obligated to share this, unedited, with everyone. – SM
Sajeev,
We read, with great interest, your latest Piston Slap post and the many comments in response to “The Last Saab = good Deal?” We wanted to take this opportunity to let you know about Saab Automobile Parts North America, the exclusive authorized provider of Saab Genuine Parts in North America. Venues like yours help us to get the message out that Saab Genuine Parts and Service are available. Read More >
You noticed that I needed to catch my breath a bit from TTAC’s Future Writers Week. The results still have me breathless. At the start, I thought with seven a day, I probably have enough until Friday. Was I ever wrong. Read More >
It’s now apparently legal to have self-driving cars in California and Nevada, and this should spread across the country rapidly. One industry report predicts we’ll have them by 2019. For the purposes of this article, let’s assume that the costs will come down slowly but surely and adoption will grow quickly. Let’s jump all the way to the end point, where self-driving technology is safe, reliable, and mandatory (yes, mandatory), just like seat belts, air bags, and so forth.
TTAC commentator Celebrity208 writes:
Sajeev:
I’d always thought that police crash investigators would check the tail light bulbs of a car that was rear ended to determine if its lights were on at the time of the crash. I thought it had something to do with the way the filament was broken/burnt/etc. So my question is two-fold, am I crazy and do they do this, and if so how might LED tail lights remove this piece of forensic evidence regarding correctly operating brake lights at the time of an accident (presuming the fault was contested)?
According to the nice entertainers at Top Gear the “Sub-Zero Fridge Coolest Car” at the moment is an Aston DB9. That makes perfect sense because the display on my Sub-Zero at home keeps going out and I anticipate the same fate is likely to strike every display screen on the DB9 much more quickly than the nine years it took my Sub-Z to start showing the freezer temperature as “88” all the time. When the speedometer on the DB9 gets to 88, you’re going to see some serious shit, man. Like a $3000 repair bill.
I’m willing to accept TG‘s verdict on car coolness because I have no idea what makes a car truly “cool”. I do, however, have some opinions about what the most uncool car on the market might be. I’m thinking the Toyota Venza is certainly among the podium finishers there and possibly worthy of the top (bottom?) spot. Why is it uncool? Well, it’s a Toyota, and Toyotas are the vehicles of choice for uncool people around the world. Along with the Avalon, it’s one of the Toyotas most obviously aimed at old people, and old people are rarely cool unless they are murderers turned blues musicians. It’s a jacked-up fake-SUV station wagon that replaced the very cool Camry real station wagon. It’s the most forgettable-looking vehicle on the road, which makes it less cool than the rolling freakshow competitor known as the Honda Crosstour. It has a standard four-cylinder engine and front-wheel-drive. I can’t think of any way in which the Venza could suck it harder than it does right now. It’s the most cynical, depressing, worthless entry on the market.
Uncool, brother. But the DB9 and the Venza, eternal opposites on the cool scale, have one fairly uncool thing in common, don’t they?
Abandon all hope: Mental Ward is now TTAC’s man in Abu Dhabi and surrounding sheikdoms For the next year, or until they kick him out, Mental will deliver a sandstorm of desert dispatches. Here is the first.
There are more than a few web sites dedicated to abandoned exotics in the Middle East.
They – cars and websites – are everywhere. What you don’t expect here is an abandoned hoopty. Last week I was getting my race bib for the Dubai marathon and I saw this beauty. When I returned on the day of the race, I got pictures. You have to hand it to the Sheikhs: Even their hoopties are classy – in a way. Read More >
Zack writes:
Hi Sajeev,
I’ve been following a series of discussion on a MK3 Ford Focus forum; in particular I’ve been following the technical discussion about how to squeeze more power from the MK3’s new 2.0 GDI motor. Of course, this involves talk of CAIs, Cat-deletes (inadvisable), and free flow exhaust. One of the more curious things to emerge is… Read More >
What’s 10 million these days – give the man a raise!
Up until the mid-1800s, debtor’s prison did await those who could not pay their debts. To this day, more than a third of U.S. states allow debtors to be jailed for non-payment. If you run a company called GM, Ally, or AIG, not only do you keep your freedom, you will be bailed out by the government, and given a $10 million salary. Waitaminute, you say, aren’t executive salaries of bailed-out companies limited to a still very generous $500,000? This is exactly the question the special inspector general for the Troubled Assets Relief Program asked. The answer, provided in a report to Treasury Tim Geithner, and the public, is scathing: The Treasury Department ignored its own rules and approved “excessive pay packages” for the leaders of bailed-out companies. Read More >
Yesterday, I took you on a visit to Tokyo, to the Japan Classic Car Association’s New Year Meeting, and on a tour of imported cars in Japan. If you believe the propaganda, there aren’t any imported cars in Japan. But it is not true.
The history of car imports to Japan is a history of Yanase, Japan’s premiere car importer. Yanase was founded in 1915 as an importer of Buicks and Cadillacs to Japan. One of his big customers was the Imperial Navy which “had nothing but Buicks,” as Jiro Yanase told a reporter. The Japanese Navy also put Yanase nearly out of business, in December of 1941.
During the war, Yanase kept the Buick and Cadillac signs up to attract service business. After the war, Yanase became GM’s sole importer to Japan. Soon, he became the world’s go-to man for car imports to Japan.
Where do all these junkyard Fiat 124 Sport Spiders come from? You don’t see them on the street, you don’t see them half-covered by tarps and raccoon nests in driveways, and you don’t even see many of them at Italian car shows. And yet I’ve been seeing these cheaper-than-an-Alfa-Spider Italian sports cars at wrecking yards, at about the same rate, since I started visiting U-Pull-It in Oakland in the early 1980s. Here’s the latest example, a little green devil I spotted at U-Pull-&-Pay Denver last month. Read More >
As usual at this time of the month, Toyota released full month sales and production figures for the preceding month, and as usual in January, the numbers are for the full calendar year. Readers of TTAC will not be surprised by the data, a look forward into 2013 however can get quite exciting. Or unnerving. The podium of the World’s Largest Automakers promises to be in disarray in 2013. Read More >
Paul writes:
Long time listener, first time caller. I have a 1982 Oldsmobile 98 Regency Brougham, that last summer I ripped the 307 out of. It now has a Chevy ZZ4 crate motor, backed by a TH 350 transmission. (Gasp! My hero!!! – SM) Read More >
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